For the final article that I read this week for EME6414 I decided to check out Ma and Leung's work on social capital as it relates to LinkedIn usage. Initially I found the summary of the article a little odd in that the article focuses on "perceived" social capital, whereas with someo of the advanced analytics features within LinkedIn it would seem that they could have focused instead of actual interaction by participants. As one would suspect the authors focus specifically on content posting as opposed to mere usage, such as reading or browsing through LinkedIn. But the actual creation of written content is not the only thing of importance to the authors since they also note the importance of liking and/or sharing content from others within their professional network since this also shows professional competence in an area. 

An added element to the article's study of the correlation between LinkedIn use and social capital is the examination of how personality types, such as introversion and extroversion, also play into this. The authors note, building off of the work of Amiel and Sargent that individuals on social media with extroverted personality types tend to disclose details regarding their activities and opinions rather than personal details that most know through face to face meetings. 

One aspect of the study made me think back to some of the discussion from last week regarding digital natives vs immigrants and some of the issues that I had with Prensky's ideas. The authors note that there are conflicting findings regarding the perceived growth in social capital among extroverts vs introverts with some thinking that the "rich get richer" and extroverts gain more through social media use and others claiming that introverts have the bigger gain. I wonder however, if these categories of social interaction don't translate 1:1 into social media interaction. For instance, it would seem that there are many people who are somewhat introverted in face to face meetings but are more open to disclosing information in an electronic format. 

admittedly one of the findings that I was most surprised by was that interacting with other people's content had a bigger effect on the gain in social capital than producing one's own content. I can see the importance of this type of interaction to build repoire with others, but I would have assumed that creating your own content would have carried more weight.